TEDxYouth@Manchester 2011 - Julian Baggini - Is There A Real You?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ต.ค. 2024
- One of the best known philosophers in the UK, Julian will ask the question 'Is There A Real You? He will draw on the research supporting his latest book 'The Ego Trick' and challenge our audience to reflect on their understanding of the 'Self'.
"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."
George Bernard Shaw
This is THE best TED talk i've seen this year for 2014. I love Philosophy and Psychology, and I love it when these two disciplines intertwine and compliment each other!
Whether or not you've already figured this or something like this out in the past, I find it's always interesting and useful to see how someone else expresses a thought or idea you already have. Listening to other perspectives isn't just about learning new things, but seeing familiar things in a different light.
Yes, so very liberating perspective. Bravo!
Wish I had the chance to listen to such a brilliant speech when I was a teenager.
This was very enlightening. Unlike the others, I didn't figure this out earlier. So, thanks for sharing.
To me, as opposed to the self, the individual, and the persona, the I am is a formless presence that assumes form, and that is who and what I am; this is the coherency of my total life experience, a constant essence.
I love how he speaks so casually while my brain explodes in response to this philosophy I've never even considered before.
Wow what an incredibly intelligent yet simple conclusion. Why didn't I think about this concept? Also a freaky realization that permanence / the metaphorical "soul" now appears to be much more unlikely. We are simply a collection of experiences and ideas adopted from others in the past. "If you have a memory transplant are you the same person...?" Oh the things that keep me up at night!!
A very old subject but a goodie. This guy is simply right.
Baggini talks about the things we can observe in ourselves - memories, knowledge, desires, etc - and he says that just like there is no 'essence of wrist-watch' beyond the assembly of watch parts, there is no essence of the self. However, nowhere in this talk does he mention the awareness and the observation of all these things, including the watch and the observed parts of the personality. It is surely this awareness that is the common thread behind all the observables, which is also the source of the sense of existence and presence and 'I'. I have found this sense of presence is strong in good and wise and trustworthy people, so it is worth encouraging it in young people. I wish our educators would stop ignoring it.
Tom Bayley There is a substantialist way of understand awareness, as something changeless behind all experiences. There is also a nonsubstantialist way of seeing awareness, not as something changeless behind all experiences, but as that very manifest experience itself. Experience is by definition conscious. Consciousness is not something existing in its own apart from all experience changelessly. Rather, like 'water' and 'h2o' -- there's no consciousness apart from that conglomerate of experiences, that's always unique and changing every moment.
Tom Bayley here's an article discussing a series of direct realizations from substantialist to nonsubstantialist understanding of awareness: awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2007/03/thusnesss-six-stages-of-experience.html
cyberlogy Thanks for an intelligent response. I'm no stranger to what you're saying, and I'm certainly not suggesting we have a soul or anything like that. Let me rephrase my objection in terms of water and H20: I'm really not sure they are the same thing at all. Water (the wet stuff) is something that can be experienced directly, whereas H2O (Hydrogen attached to Oxygen) has to be experienced in the mind as scientific concepts and imagination. Similarly there is awareness of being aware, and there is the neuroscientific understanding of brain processes. If we conflate the two then we're being ignorant of the way we're addressing the 'facts'.
I don't think it's healthy to be relying *so* much on explanations - not because the explanations are wrong per se, but because our glibness with these concepts moves our foundations i.e. our 'real world' away from direct experience and into the realm of concept. We might then arrive at a nonsubstantialist understanding that is merely a conceit, built out of a very substantial bunch of concepts which override the authentic direct nonsubstantialist realization. And as I hinted earlier, the better human qualities seem to develop through direct experience 'of' (or 'as', however you like to put it) rather than through conceptual thought 'about'. I think the same is true of our progress through the ladder of realizations you linked.
we are the awareness behind our thoughts - Eckhart Tolle
Sceptical at first, but nonetheless there is a case to be made for the idea that there is not a significant innate 'self'. Rather, as he concludes, the idea that our 'self' is a combination of experiences, beliefs and memories also prompts the realization that one can shape his own form of 'self'. Instead of having to discover who he really is deep inside, he can influence who he is. This is both liberating and empowering.
@mremgee Organic chemistry implies a Carbon where a backbone either meets/branches, or angles away. It keeps it from getting too crowded with letters, since O-chem always has Carbon involved (typically Hydrogen are also implied, but sometimes not).
This is so fascinating!!!
Thanks for the great quote!
Was a nice talk, hope he keeps searching
@Mewsie I agree, I think he missed this vital observation in his talk. There's the phenomenon of self, but then there's the awareness of all phenomenon which isn't a 'thing' that can be observed.
Those who seek will never find,...the more one seeks, the more the universe rearranges itself to accomodate ones desire to seek.
Our opinions are based on our experiences. One experience influences the other.
this is part of why i break out in what is perceived as unexplainable anger whenever I hear people say "just be yourself". if i finally gain the presence of mind to wipe the foam from my chin and form coherent sentences i respond with "which one?"
I don't know about you, but I don't treat my friends the same way i do my grandmother, and i don't go up to her and say "yo momma's so fat" for shits and giggles. We all play several roles, or selves - and none of them are less real than the others.
@HefecTikva
we are constantly experiencing contradictions with our desires,we want something and at the same time we are embarrassed of wanting it because of psychological issues, social conditioning etc..apart from 'creating ourselves' we also have to 'live as ourselves', and to do that we have to (not find, but rather) *listen* to ourselves.. listen to what we have previously created..a deep inner procedure where you give voice to who you are,transcending all the social filters etc
I feel so much pain looking at the picture of "water"
The formless presence that assumes form to know itself :)
Zen quote - "Want to know why you're unhappy? It's because 99% of everything you do is for yourself, and there isn't one."
@Foryeva Yeah...or watch it. "A Conversation with Myself" is viewable here.
when ppl say "just be yourself" they probably mean "just be your true self up to this very day"
more like, just be the one i think you are.
Yes, people tend to flatter themselves with being virtuous, and incapable of evil. Statistically, though, people are very capable of it. But you're different, aren't you? Please tell me more about how you manage to remain true to your core while being amiable to most.
I don’t agree with his criticism of the illusion terminology. Illusion doesn’t mean that something isn’t real. It means something isn’t what it seems. So I think the term illusion fits quite well.
"By the Soul, and the proportion and order given to it, And its enlightenment as to its wrong and its right, Truly he succeeds that purifies it, And he fails that corrupts it! " The Holy Quran 91:7 to 10
Tackiest TED intro I've ever seen in my life...
@HefecTikva This is true. This is Soul - Creation at the heart of Being.
@dumbo800 - Exactly! However, without the double bond, it is actually a condensed representation of plutonium tetraflouride.
limits are something you put on yourself
"Is" there a you, who ask the question? and to hear and aware of the answer to your question?
Definitely a very poor choice in graphing a molecule of water. Using that structure, it is formaldehyde (except the double bond to the oxygen is omitted).
What about the unity of perspective? Is the watcher behind the mind not the self?
@HefecTikva
Why not find your self first and then create it?
Or in other words: If we are creating our selves, then our self is this entity being eable to create itself (subject in scientific philosophy).
They should just say that the soul or spirit is an illusion, that's what it is, it's a more religious than scientific concept, a human construction.
et dozent focken exist unless oi say so!
good for you
Nope, I definitely got the main point. Thanks for assuming I can't make a criticism about a small thing, while understanding the whole.
Is he related to David Cameron? Looks a bit like him.
BODY: Food molecules and processed to build our bodies & at least every 7 years all of our cells have died and are replaced with fresh materials. physically there is no core. SELF: we are a product of stimulations and thoughts, each new one changing who we are, Take them away and we are nothing. There is no ego core. At most we can say that we are a pattern! To discover this truth is to experience an ego death, one of the most painful realisations a human can have.
verye good, just a shame he showed a picture of Budai when he was quoting the Buddha.
@muzzblack Ego death can be liberating. It supports the realisation that life and consciousness is a gift, perhaps nothing more than a random pattern, but amazing nevertheless. It can support empathy and the connections we have with each other.. Or you can just become a nihilist of course...
we are a system that uses other systems and we're part of bigger systems, but we're still a system.
This all sounds suspiciously close to the Buddhist concepts of anatta (non-selfhood) and aniccia (impermanence), two of the three "characteristics of existence".
@GlorifiedTruth I'm not an expert in chem, but I really do not see anyway that this could represent Plutonium Pentafluoride.
but thats just my belief, some will disagree and say, son i did it in months.
thanks for the nice try, still some bits are there to discover...
Where did that Carbon appear when he talks about water !?!?!?!?
Thumbs up if you know about organic chemistry. :)
I'm actually surprised and a little disappointed that the presenter quotes Shakyamuni Buddha, but shows a picture of Hotei Bodhisattva. Having done his research on "self" and understanding its relationship to Buddhism, I would have thought he would have known that the fat man is not a Buddha.
Why do you expect him to know that? He has completely distorted Buddhist and Hindu concepts of Self. How could you have missed that??
@livefast86 I feel it is more as if we have these collection of experiences, but we are more than just that collection of experiences we also have opinions about those events some of which can drastically change the type of person you are. We must do what we feel to be right and its those decisions during your life, effected by our opinions, which define you.
*idk if that made any sense. [4]
Where are my fellow psychonauts? Thoughts?
nothnig new, but I like it. He put ti in a very nice way :-)
look up Liberation Unleashed guys
@dumbo800 I felt uneasy, being a chemist.
最後那段是法句經
it explains the thing *you* already know.
@JustMereArt Good. Point.
Just because it's not a brand new idea, he shouldn't be talking about it?
I think - he was given a chance to reach a major audience with a topic, and he chose an important one.
Stop crying.
Stop crying now.
I think there's a false dichotomy going on here. I don't think it's necessary to think these two views are mutually exclusive. Julian himself says "we can change TO AN EXTENT". We have limits. What creates our limits is our unchanging, original core that we must get to know; otherwise we're doomed to all kinds of mistakes.
But our core is not some iron ball chained to our leg. It's more like the canvas of our life.
Well then your definition of 'real' breaks down. If something can be both an illusion, and real, then everything is real, and nothing is an illusion.
Didn't take you long to offend me, though. This is why your answer doesn't matter: you can define yourself any way you want, but only actions are going to persuade me that you are any different from what you claim because it's your actions that define you. Praise yourself and make yourself feel as different as you want, just don't ooze that nonsense in my direction as I've no interest or patience for it, and I'm not willing to feign either, so have your tantrum, but, again, not near me.
Yes, aren't we special?
he sounds like a humanist.
I hope Hinduism has answers to the issue he is addressing...
@MisterAriLeon .. it is obvious, the man is ignorant of his own ignorant.
In holy Quran Persona, is the Doer and the Responsible for oneself actions on front of Allah the creator of everything.
haha you still say you cant do it, what if i told you, your limiting yourself right now.. years try decades my friend and come back.. If you wanna be mozart it can be hard to do it in "years"
......Read "Time and Being" (Hiedeggar). Oh yeah, don't ever say anything racist!
This won't abode well for our resident dualists...
LIfe is both accepting yourself (80% of life as a base) as a part of a bigger system and creating yourself as an individual (20% of life) as Brahman & Jiva in Vedanta). One without the other is an imbalanced life. You are the living Oracle and living christ. Space and Time does not exist for 80% of your life. However, for 20% of your life space and Time exist as there is a limit to your physical form. Thats it! Life solved!
I liked the talk.. Until he began to philosophy about limits
this guy is so wrong... about personality being an assembly of things. about limits... very mediocre thinking. why did he get to speak ? very annoying
This is embarassing.
This guy has no clue about philosophy, and a misunderstanding of Buddhism.
I don't have time to correct any wrong assumption he is making. But to begin with: The self consciousness is the basis of science and philosophy (Descartes), everything can be doubted, but not the process of doubting itself (cogito, sum). Therefore there is no sense in using neuroscience as an argument in philosophy.
This is a very bad way to teach young people, cause they get a wrong impression.